


in which karkat catches a cold and john and dave help

by sinisterhand



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cuddling, Domestic, Fluff, Gratuitous Movie Referencing (I Mean Look At The Ship Involved), M/M, Multi, Not Epilogue Compliant, Other, Polyamory, Polyswap Present, Post-Canon, Sickfic, Throuple - M/M/M, everything is happy and nothing hurts, nothing bad happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:20:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24909064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinisterhand/pseuds/sinisterhand
Summary: What it says on the tin, folks. Karkat comes down with a bug. Dave rambles. John takes the day off. Soup is made. Movies are marathoned.
Relationships: John Egbert/Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 1
Kudos: 28
Collections: Polyswap Presents 2020





	in which karkat catches a cold and john and dave help

**Author's Note:**

  * For [planetundersiege](https://archiveofourown.org/users/planetundersiege/gifts).



> Hi planetundersiege! Your prompts for this exchange were so good I just couldn't pick one (sorry I haven't read Hiveswap 😬) and I wanted to get all the cuddling and stuff in! I really hope you like this—thanks for your fun Polyswap prompts and I had a lot of fun writing both!
> 
> Also, this is majorly influenced by fandom favorite Johnkat sickfic[ Menthol Cherry Red](https://archiveofourown.org/works/700602/chapters/1290987) by JumpingJackFlash, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

“Dave, wake up.”

“Nnnnnuhh,” Dave rebuts intelligently, burrowing his face away from the sound and into a forgiving pillow. 

“It’s an emergency, Dave,” the intrusion says disapprovingly, and yanks the pillow out from under his head. A brief tug/slap/headbutt fight ensues before Dave is forced to relinquish the pillow and gets repeatedly doofed in the face.

“Jesus shit, augh, I’m up,” Dave splutters between mouthfuls of pillow. “Pff—what? What?!”

“Dave, I can’t believe you’re doing this while your better half is fucking expiring.” The blurry intrusion resolves itself into Karkat as Dave slides his shades on. He takes a moment to appreciate the adorable bedhead he’s rocking, hair sticking up like an adorable hedgehog disappointing his family by becoming deeply involved in punk rock subculture and adopting their signature hairstyle.

“Please if you ever bore me anything but the deepest bileful platonic contempt stop mumblerapping to yourself like Post Trollone and comfort me in my dying moments,” Karkat blahs feelingly. Dave’s so in love with him. He loves this shouty dipshit with every bone in his body. He could listen to Karkat read the literal phonebook (actually, one time Karkat had gotten so mad looking in the carapacian yellow pages for a plumber and he had been scanning out loud, with outraged commentary, and Dave had quite literally been content to listen to that for hours before Jade gave up and just fixed it herself. Hopefully god-tier immunity includes whatever happens when you drink lightly uranium infused tap water, yikes. Haha not dealing with that right now though.)

“You’re not dying, Karkat,” Dave says, resigning himself to being awake. “We’ve been over this. You have a headache because you don’t drink water and you spend 15 hours a day looking at a screen while yelling.”

“It’s not just another headache, dipshit,” Karkat snips, though he does seem mildly quelled by the familiar reminder. “I woke up this morning and my bellowsacks were all creaky and sore, there was this slime coating and extruding from all of my orificial surfaces, I keep falling asleep with my eyes open… and yes, my thinkpan aches like someone did a jaunty tapdance all over it in stickball cleats, which, for the record, is at least two orders of magnitude more than my normal level of brain soreness.” Dave raises one eyebrow.

“Dude, have you never had a cold before?”

“A what,” Karkat says suspiciously.

“People didn’t get minor seasonal respiratory infections on Alternia?” Karkat just looks nonplussed. Dave elaborates. “There’s this virus that makes you cough and drip everywhere; it’s not that bad and it only lasts a couple days, but it’s super contagious, so humans have just kind of been slowly, intermittently passing it around since the beginning of history. No big deal.”

“That’s incredibly stupid.” Dave shrugs. “For one thing, there were no minor to moderate injuries or sicknesses on Alternia; either it was fatal or it was nothing.”

“...Uh huh.”

“And for another thing, Alternia didn’t really have interactions that could act as effective disease vectors. Trolls didn’t really… hang out.”

“Huh.” Dave squints. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.” The two of them just stare at each other for a moment. “Should I… soup? Do you need soup?”

“Why would I  _ need _ soup?”

“Look, I don’t know, that’s just what you do to sick people. Unless you’re an actual crazy person, in which case you make a ten-year-old drink a near-lethal amount of cough syrup and then fistfight you while robotripping all the way out of his tiny fucking mind, I guess, but on TV and stuff they always bring soup.”

“I guess that does make sense for the throat and stuff, and we’ll discuss the other thing later—”

“Aw, we don’t have to,” Dave protests quickly.

“No, we will, it’s just that right now I sound and feel like I’ve been gargling Sollux’s throwing stars every time I talk, and John isn’t home yet, but,” he says more gently. “we  _ will _ talk about it. We’re your boyfriends. We’re here for you.” Dave cracks a tiny, soft smile. Something soft passes between the two of them in that silence. Then Dave immediately shatters the tender moment by imitating Karkat’s sore throat voice, gritting out “ _ Blargh Karkat I am your faaather _ ” and butting his head into Karkat’s shoulder like a cat. Karkat shoves his face away, holding him at arm’s length as he squishes his cheek into Karkat’s palm. 

“Shut up, you dumb piece of shit, I can’t believe I voluntarily spend time in your presence, that doesn’t sound like anything except what would happen if you pushed Gamzee through a garbage disposal, and I’m suffering here while your idiot ass grasps desperately for pop culture analogues,” he says, but he’s laughing, and so is Dave, and as he continues his ridiculous raspy cold-voice and hiccoughing laughs just give Dave more fodder for mocking imitation, which Karkat feels compelled to respond to and make him laugh more, creating a vicious cycle of clamorous goonery that goes on until Karkat actually doubles over, wheezing for breath, and Dave sheepishly shuts his trap.

“Come on, I’ll make you some soup,” he says, and gently chivvies Karkat into the front, where he deposits him on the couch, disappears into the kitchen and starts banging around. Half-reclined and engulfed in blankets, Karkat slips into a fuzzy kind of half-doze, Dave’s rummaging noises becoming comforting white noise in the background.

⁂⁂⁂

He jolts awake with a racking cough, leaning over the side of the couch in order to hack his lungs up unimpeded. 

“Hegh-augh-graaah-FUCK-gack-egh-egh,” Karkat says, with feeling. “ _ Shit.” _ Two sets of footsteps rush towards him, and it’s only a second before John’s worried face floats over him like a parade float sponsored by Buckteeth Incorporated. 

“Ooh, that sounds bad, Karkat, buddy,” John says sympathetically, and tries to pat the only part of Karkat not thoroughly ensconced in afghan, which happens to be his left foot.

“Hrrgh-geck-THINK-aaagh, cough, cough-cough-COCK-cough,” Karkat says, which nevertheless appears to get his point across as the look of gentle concern on John’s idiot face is replaced by dopey amusement. 

“Somehow I can barely tell the difference between sick-Karkat-angry-noises and normal-Karkat-angry-noises,” he teases, butting his torso into Karkat’s personal space on the couch despite protests and leaning into his side. John pulls his legs up on the couch and starts trying to half-spoon Karkat, who makes a lot of angry and pestilential noise about it but leans into the touch. Dave finds them cuddling like that, John’s arms draped over Karkat’s shoulders so that he’s kind of wearing a cape made of John, Karkat exhausted from being awake again and almost falling asleep again under the blanket-John pile. 

“John, colon, holds Karkat,” Dave says flatly. “Karkat, colon, is hold.” Karkat muzzily tries to flip him off but just ends up kind of poking John, who fails to notice, and Dave takes the unspoken cue to join the cuddle pile gladly. He wedges his ass in on the other side of Karkat, squishing the three of them into a highly compacted and efficient dude sandwich with the arms of the couch forming the constrictive bread. Dave smooches John on the forehead, which makes him giggle, which makes Dave do that specific gradation of Strider Blankface that means he’s holding back an  _ aww. _

“Hi, honey,” he drones, unnervingly pitch-perfect sitcom dad impression in full force. “How was work?”

“I was there for fifteen minutes before I got a rambling text that my lady love had fallen deathly ill et cetera, and could I pick up some canned soup on my way home,” John says. “So just another humdrum day at the office, I guess.” Dave snorts.

“Egbert, not even in a shitty movie do you ever hear anyone use the phrase “humdrum” with a straight face. Who are you, my declining, offensively Southern grandma with a weird nickname like Maw-moo or Wibbly?” John makes an eloquent  _ durr _ face back, sticking out his tongue and crossing his eyes.

“People say  _ humdrum _ , Dave, you would know if you ever went outside and, like, put on pants instead of a Pikachu onesie.” Karkat interrupts.

“Hold on,” he says, voice still rough but somewhat recovered now that he’s no longer trying to bellow. “John, you blew off work just because  _ my delicate baby throat had a stupid fucking boo-boo ouchie? _ ” 

“Well, first of all, little more than an ouchie here, dude, we gotta make sure you don’t get some kind of troll infection with this kind of cough going on,” Dave breaks in.

“And second of all,” Ugh, Karkat can’t decide if it’s disgusting, creepy, adorable, or all three that they finish each other’s conversations like that. “I did not  _ blow off _ work, I took a sick day, which I am totally allowed to do, I haven’t used any yet this year, even, and like Dave said, someone needs to be here to pick your lungs up off the floor and stuff them back through your mouth.”

“Yes,” Karkat says, rolling his eyes, momentarily derailed by this fresh idiocy, “ _ that’s _ how medical science works.”

“Definitely, we might have to stick them back in with Hello Kitty bandaids and kiss them better too,” Dave inserts. “Scientifically speaking.” 

“ _ Any _ ways,” John says, casually emphasizing the terminal S to get Karkat’s goat, “they don’t even need me at the library. We never see more than two dozen patrons on a Wednesday and honestly, Mina’s fine on her own.”

“I called in sick to work too,” Dave deadpans. “Even though it was a hard thing to do, I gave my Employee of the Quarter, my MVP in the Sick Beats offices and the Rad Memes workspace sick leave to take care of his gravely ill partner, without him the Killer Tunes machinery grinds on, paper just piling on the floor as it leaves the printer like fresh snow with nobody there to take care of it, my CEM, Chief Executive Mayor, warned me the kind of fiscal repercussions this kind of sentiment could cause, but not even his keen business acumen could stand in the way of loves so pure and true, and Karkats so sad and adorable—” 

“Dave,” John says reprovingly. “If you start riffing right now Karkat’s either going to start laughing at you, yelling at you, or both, and fuck up his throat again.” Karkat opens his mouth to contest, realizes the dramatic irony such an action would fulfil, and settles for trying to use a hostile cast of his eyebrows to convey his severe disapproval of John’s accurate assessment. “It’s not that bad, Karkat. We can do a movie marathon!”

“Karkat’s whole life is a movie marathon,” Dave says, rolling his eyes, though he shuts up when John elbows him. By this time, the three of them are firmly situated in a tangled cuddle pile with Dave’s feet in Karkat’s lap, John’s head on Dave’s shoulder, and Karkat and Dave holding hands. 

“We can watch ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ and Dave won’t even antagonize you by claiming he’s Lina instead of Cosmo,” John cajoles. Dave, surprisingly, does not say  _ But we have exactly the same voice _ , and start doing his terrible impression, as is his habit, which Karkat is grateful for because he would have been honor-bound to physically kick his ass, and it would have ended terribly for all of them under these circumstances. Being sick sucks ass, but he gets to take the day off with his boyfriends, approximately twenty blankets, and a true classic of romantic comedy, so maybe it’s not that bad at all.


End file.
